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I often catch myself using Downloads to store a very suspicious quantity of files.
Yes. Downloads is the way.
If you want to make yourself organize better, set up a cron to remove all downloads older than 7 days 😳 then you’ll be efficient—and probably have nightmares.
No,I’ll just disable the cron job before it executes and forget about it.
😳
You’re a massive du -sh
Downloads is usually my largest folder. Funny thing is that it is literally all just Linux isos because I’m trying some things with servers
“Linux ISOs”
Yeah cause my work computer limits onedrive storage to like 100mb and downloads is one if the only places where I have write access and it doesn’t go to onedrive.
I’ll say that as much as I love Apple and macOS, Finder has some pretty terrible defaults that make file management pretty difficult for the average user. The default “All Files” view is atrocious.
- Not being able to create a file
- Folders aren’t by default listed at the top
- Spring-loaded folders are hit or miss
- No good intuitive way to set defaults for ALL folders at once
- No good intuitive way to reset any folder defaults
- .DS_Store and ._DS_Store (nuff said)
What is a spring-loaded folder?
- Download iTerm2
- See 1
- See 2
- See 3
- See 4
- See 5
I HATE that windows will sort folders at the top instead of alphabetically with everything else. I guess it comes from using a Mac for so long.
I agree about .DS_Store in any mixed os environment though.
Yeah, I don’t know why having folders at the top would make anything easier.
Because if you’re looking for a subfolder you’re not looking for a file, and vice versa? It doesn’t matter much in sparse directories, but it annoys me having to scroll through a ton of files to find the folder I want in directories with both.
I too like a lot of things about Mac, but finder could be improved, for sure.
(I have gotten used to a lot of its features and hate Windows’ defaults too, so there’s that. I don’t think an ideal exists, unless it’s in Linux somewhere and I just need to dual boot the desktop and get it over with)
On macOS I just type the first few letters of the file/folder and because it’s in alphabetical order, I find it immediately. I don’t want to have to think “oh is this a file or a folder” then scroll around to the appropriate area.
This reminds me of users who complain about
<select>fields on websites: they always want some weird sorting instead of just tabbing into the field and typing a few letters.Thar makes sense, although I am generally not trying to use the keyboard at the same time (to be honest I was not aware you could filter a finder view like that, I thought it only ran search and I have never found MacOS’s search to be satisfactory)
I grew up on Windows but when I came to macOS I went hard into key commands; the UI is a lot more uniform so using a combination of key commands and Trackpad gestures you can fly through tasks pretty quickly.
Folders aren’t by default listed at the top
This is a aweful windows only thing. Anyone who likes it should be ashamed.
No good intuitive way to set defaults for ALL folders at once
This is inexperience with the finder because it’s ridiculously easy to set this.
Folders aren’t by default listed at the top
This is a aweful windows only thing. Anyone who likes it should be ashamed.
No. You cannot and will not shame me for something that is not shame worthy. Shame on you for trying.
No good intuitive way to set defaults for ALL folders at once
This is inexperience with the finder because it’s ridiculously easy to set this.
Do tell oh wise one. I’ve been using MacOS for over 15 years, and would love to learn the ways of a master such as yourself.
🙄
No. You cannot and will not shame me for something that is not shame worthy. Shame on you for trying.No good intuitive way to set defaults for ALL folders at once
You should be extra ashamed for not being ashamed and additionally shamed for taking this so seriously that you feel it necessary to attempt to shame someone who cheekily said you should be ashamed.
Do tell oh wise one. I’ve been using MacOS for over 15 years, and would love to learn the ways of a master such as yourself
Let me ChatGPT that for you without giving a shit how this formats, followed by more shame for relaxing your struggle with things because you lack the gumption to figure these things out in your own despite 15 years of use.
- Open a Finder Window
Pick any folder (usually your Home folder is a good starting point).
⸻
- Set the View You Want • Choose your preferred view style: • Icons: ⌘1 • List: ⌘2 • Columns: ⌘3 • Gallery: ⌘4
Then adjust things like: • Column widths • Sorting / Arrange by • Sidebar visibility • Preview pane visibility
⸻
- Apply with “Show View Options”
- With the folder open, press ⌘J (or go to View → Show View Options).
- At the bottom of the panel, you’ll see: • Use as Defaults (for List, Icon, or Gallery views) • Always open in … view
- Click Use as Defaults → this sets your chosen view/layout for all folders of that type.
Why would you use the Finder when macOS has a perfectly fine shell?
Image previews because I give my memes really dumb filenames
“SDD”?
“SDD”?
Yes. Solid Disk Disk.
Solid disk drive
If you call the bottom picture a “Data Lake” you can IPO and walk away with millions
Time series
“Unstructured Data”.
Just missing a random pile of files on the desktop.
My actual desk and office - messy. My desktop - folder, folder, 4 shortcuts. My phone -groups of apps ordered by function - Pebble, Office, Entertainment, etc. My garage - absolute hoarder nightmare from hell cause I just can’t seem to get to it. Why I can be ordered in one area and not in another is beyond me.
What is this “desktop” of which you speak?
Is that what’s under all these files?
I find myself having too many nested folders, and I’m just a normie. I wonder how deep they go for you tech people.
At some points, Windows won’t let me change the file name because it was too long and I’m assuming the file path to it plus the ridiculously long name (“person last name, first name - type of document (purpose) yyyymmdd”) just breaks Windows.
Sometimes I have to copy those files to my desktop just to rename the new file, so that I can upload the file to an online system that only lets me upload files with names under 42 characters long. It’s wild.
This was one of the reasons I quit trying to develop on Windows way back when. I had a very well organized system of subfolders for all my code, and it was literally running into some kind of path length limit trying to import deeply nested dependencies in certain projects. This was WELL into the era of 64-bit computing, absolutely no excuse other than Microsoft taking shortcuts.
I still run into this issue when one of my company’s clients requires developing on Windows. Doesn’t take many subfolders before
node_modulesjust starts breaking.There are lots of reasons I hate developing on windows and that’s certainly one of them.
You can enable long names in Windows, essentially removing that restriction and giving you the power of all the sub folders up to something like 26’000 characters.
- Open the Registry Editor.
- Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem
- Find the LongPathsEnabled DWORD value, double-click it, and set its value to 1
- Restart your computer
- Be free and happy
That sounds like something my organization would have restricted access to.
And I guess this isn’t the default for backwards compatibility with 1978’s tech?
A lot of apps still use legacy Windows APIs that don’t understand very long paths. Those APIs have been deprecated for maybe 15 years or more, but developers are lazy. Microsoft can’t add support for long paths to the old APIs because they use a fixed buffer size (which means that only a certain amount of memory space is available for the path, and increasing it would break the apps that rely on that). They can’t totally remove the old APIs because every app that uses them would break.
They can’t totally remove the old APIs because every app that uses them would break.
For every other company I would buy that argument. But for one that forces customers to throw away millions of computers which can’t run Win 11… no.
Well son of a bitch, there was a workaround
In my projects folder I have an “all” folder where I store all my projects. But back at the projects folder there are others like “by-client”, " by-language", and “by-date”. When I make a new project I create it inside the all folder, and then place shortcuts inside the corresponding folders.
I do something like:
From Documents > ‘routine documents’ > FY > Month > Section (personnel, operations, or logistics) > and whatever task from there for my main day-to-day stuff
But, for operations outside of the monthly sort, like managing personnel training, it gets really weird;
From Documents > Training > FY > department > categories of training > subcategory > individual person’s folder for the course > application folders with dates (the last folder here is when the one that got approved and they’re going to the school on).
This one is where I end up with file names I can’t rename.
In my obsidian notes folder, i have
- 01 - Inbox
- 02 - Breadbox
- 03 - Data
.
- Inbox is for newly created notes
- Breadbox is for notes that i need to reference or otherwise want quick access to
- Data is for everything else
For file navigation, i use links and references within the notes themselves, which creates a network of linked files that is far far easier to navigate than folders
Everything else is sorta all over the place, but in general
- ~/Documents
- dumping ground for important documents, folders are arbitrarily made as I go
- ~/Downloads
- dumping grounds for downloaded things, generally important files are moved elsewhere
- ~/Code is where i put all of my personal projects and other junk related to programming
~/ is the user home directory
- C:\Users\Name for windows
- /home/name for linux
For pictures, i use a self hosted Immich instance
My paths are pretty short ngl /home/user/devel/projects/android/testproject/ Probably is the longest one. Or maybe even /home/user/devel/lessons/dotnet-aspnet/exam/AspnetExam/xxxroot/libs/bootstrap-icons/ But that one is temporary, I’ll archive it once it’s done
I shit you not, IT around 2004, I had a nurse who stored all her important docs in “Recyle Bin”
She put in a ticket that her computer was slow. We scheduled a time to look at it and made sure she knew to be there.
When I showed up, she had left to go to lunch on purpose so she could take a free long lunch. I asked her manager to call her back in, she refused.
I diagnosed she was out of space, and emptied her bin.
That did not end up going well.
She was furious, Her boss was mad. My boss was pissed that it happened but considered it reasonable since she refused to be there.
I spent the better part of 4 hours undeleting deleted recycle bin contents which is WAYYYYYY harder than undeleting deleted files. They’re already UUID’s and bringing them back into existence will not put them back in the recycle bin, all that meta is gone.
deleted by creator
I asked her what the fuck she was thinking later in the process. She knew that files weren’t supposed to be there She just thought it was a good idea, and was very defensive borderline offensive about being able to store files wherever she wanted.
My first inclination was she was just putting non-work-related stuff in there so that her manager would never see it. But no, there were hundreds of megs of work related stuff. I recommended she not store the 500 megs of personal digital camera fodder on what computer if she was that tight on space. Hard drives of this era were only a handful of gigs large. She just flipped out some more demanded a bigger disc. I had a private consult with her manager and mentioned that We could get a bigger desk but it was going to come out of her budget. She declined.
A year later we did SOX compliance and as part of that we deleted emails over 3 months and deleted any recycling bin data over a month old. I made sure her manager noted this and that it would delete her preferred file storage and never heard another word out of them.
Well duh.
It is a recycle bin after all.
The thoughts will be reused at some point for something new /s
I think most computer users now don’t know that file systems exist
Especially younger people. They’re used to files just… being there on their phone. Photo galleries? Nah, just scroll though every photo you’ve ever taken to find the right one.
That, and having powerful search functionality + tagging has made perfect folder structures less of a requirement.
Photo albums? Nah, just scroll though every photo you’ve ever taken to find the right one.
Then screenshot it so that the screenshot of the photo is at the top, then switch to the other app and upload the screenshot of the photo there.
Man, I hate my moms pc folder layout, like why do you have Documents folder inside of documents folder inside of Documents folder? Why do you create excel sheets inside Downloads folder when you didn’t download them???
Ugh thanks for reminding me to clean up my desktop, I guess…
Do you even git?
Surely experiment 1…n should be branches.
Ok. Calling me out like that. It’s fine, I deserve it.
I store everything “temporarily” because “I’ll sort it later” on the Desktop.
It’s never later.
I call it “Purgatory”
Hey, I know what’s in my folder labeled Stuff.
~/Desktop/sort/sort/sortme/shit_from_dt/sort/really_important_shit/sort
